Some tabs that have opened in my browser in recent days:
- Some relatives of victims of terrorist attack in Paris are refusing to pay the victims’ tax arrears, saying the money is doing more to promote terrorism than to protect them, and specifically that it is insulting to tax the victims to pay for the legal defense of the perpetrators.
- Activists in the North Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are using tax resistance to pressure the government to provide better security.
- Haringey retiree Paul Nicolson has been refusing to pay his council tax in protest against austerity measures that made Britain’s most poor subject to this tax for the first time.
By refusing to pay, Nicolson says he wanted to get “on the receiving end of the enforcement procedure in solidarity with the poorest residents of Haringey”. “Threats of eviction are being shelled out by computers all the time,” he says. “Food, clothes, fuel, transport and other necessities are all competing with council tax and rent for the £73 benefit — there is a massive competition which simply can’t work. People might give up food to pay the taxes because of the threat of court or eviction.”
- The Greek-style protest of storming toll gates and waving the drivers through appears to have spread to Toulouse.
- Die Presse looks at the dismal state (for the State) of tax collection in Greece.
